


Words for Fathers

by bissonomy (Macdicilla)



Category: The Left Hand of Darkness - Ursula K. Le Guin
Genre: Established Relationship, Estraven lived, Fatherhood, Fix-It, Gratuitous Karhidish, Other, Post-Canon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-11-18
Updated: 2019-11-18
Packaged: 2021-02-12 21:36:47
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 10,972
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21483229
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Macdicilla/pseuds/bissonomy
Summary: Genly and Estraven have long talks on the way to Osborth.
Relationships: Genly Ai/Therem Harth rem ir Estraven
Comments: 14
Kudos: 39





	1. Odamha

In the aftermath of our mission, Estraven and I fell prey to that feeling of loss of purpose that happens after achieving something so all-consuming. My colleague Lang Heo Hew had, at my request, taken up the post of Ekumen Ambassador. More often than not, Envoys such as myself would become Ambassadors, but I was weary to death and beset by traumas. I needed nothing more than to crawl into a comfortable hole which took the form of our apartment—mine and Estraven’s—in Ehrenrang. On paper, I was still a consultant to the Ekumen’s interplanetary relations program. In practice, this meant that Heo Hew would ring me up when she had questions or needed advice, and I would help her, but only every now and then. My principal priority was to find whatever local job would take me. I had quit my Ekumenical service; I had chosen to stay on Winter.

Estraven was similarly under-occupied. King Argaven had revoked Estraven’s banishment (and not nearly as quickly as I would have liked), but my friend could never be Prime Minister again. He wanted nothing to do with the Kyorremy these days, not out of resentment, but out of an almost existential disappointment with them. I think he was only staying in Ehrenrang because I was there, and I was only staying in Ehrenrang because I had to be there to help Heo Hew as she got diplomacy on its feet. His days were spent much in the same listless way as mine, with the sole difference that he was attending physical therapy twice a halfmonth, for his foray gun injuries. His right arm was working again, but still hurt tremendously, and his right lung was only half-saved in the end. Physical exertion was still troublesome for him. We were fortunate enough that our unit was on the first floor of the island building, since it meant fewer stairs.

It was difficult to see him in pain, though obviously not as difficult as it was for him to be in pain. Had I been king, I would have banished foray guns. (Estraven laughed a little when I told him this.)

But despite all that, and even though it was a rather substantial “all that,” there was something fundamentally right about the life we had carved out: We were by each other’s side in all things. The warmth and trust between us made everything bearable. We were, as it were, pulling together, sharing the yoke.

When I first told him that I had no intention of returning to Terra, he assumed it was because I no longer knew anyone there. Even if I had a hundred mothers and fathers still living, I told him, I would still choose to remain here. That was when we both fully understood.

In all but name, we had become kemmerings. There was no spoken vow, because there was no need to speak it. We were lovers and friends who had both decided that we would not be parted. We had both decided the centers of our lives.

In our home, there were balance, harmony, and sharing. He taught me Karhidish cooking and I taught him some words from my native tongue. We exchanged stories. We slept in our bed with separate blankets—mine heavy, his light. I kept a small, battery-powered space heater by my side of our bed. We turned it off on the days when we made love.

One time, afterwards, when the fire and intensity of kemmer were mostly over, I drew him a lukewarm bath, using the electric ale-kettle from the kitchen to boil some of the icy tap water. The result was a rather beery-smelling tub, which amused him when we sat in it, as did the presence of a kettle in the bathroom.

We slept like stones that night.

The next day was a civic holiday, but I forget which one. It was autumn. Schools were closed and parks and museums were full of people, but Estraven and I stayed in. The sound of the outdoors was distant. Inside, all was quiet. Estraven was in bed, still asleep, and I was reading on the couch with two blankets over my legs when the _sitto_ phone buzzed, making me jump.

Neither of us was expecting guests today. I pushed the button to listen, and the voice on the other end was familiar, but it took me a few seconds to recognize it as Ashe Foreth’s, since I had not often heard him in high spirits. I buzzed him into the building, and when he arrived at our apartment, I was waiting with the door open, so that he would not have to knock and wake Estraven. He greeted me amiably, with both hands.

I did not ask him why he was here. The conversational styles of Karhide had grown more familiar and comfortable to me this past year, my fourth year on Gethen, and I had at last warmed up to the concept of trusting someone to get to the point on their own time. So instead, I took his outer coat and retrieved the kettle from the bathroom, where I had left it last night, to offer him some hot ale.

“Just water would be all right, thank you,” Ashe said, taking off his indoor coat too.

So, we sat and began to talk. We had not seen each other since Estraven’s return from Orgoreyn and the hospital, so he asked me polite questions about what I had been up to since then and listened attentively to my rather boring answers. I asked him about himself, and he began talking about the encargo system instead.

“See, the post handles letters just fine,” he was saying, “but they won’t touch packages. So, the individual must do his own research. Often, it works. A lot of the time, it is possible to find a promising truck route and obliging drivers who won’t mind carrying one more thing on their shipment of, say, cloth, or produce, or radio parts. And yet, sometimes there is no route with stops at a convenient enough location for the recipient, or sometimes the drivers aren’t obliging.”

“That sounds challenging,” I said mildly, reminding myself to be patient.

“It is. It’s often far simpler to give the encargo to a friend, relative, or someone trusted who happens to be going in the right direction. One asks them first, in fact. The trucks are a last resort.”

“I see.”

“Have I told you about a foretelling I have coming up?”

I could not follow what connection there was between this and all the courier talk, but I let Ashe lead me.

“You _haven’t_,” I said. “Go on.”

The thread was still unfollowable. There was a foretelling at his fastness at Orgny in a day, he said, but it turned out he had no interest in talking about the foretelling itself. Whatever question his circle would answer was irrelevant to whatever his point was. Instead, he emphasized that he was unable to absent himself from it.

“Because of the way all of the other Celibates’ schedules worked out,” Ashe explained, “they need me to be there. Lamentably, I cannot be in two places at once.”

“And the other place you need to be is…?”

“Osborth. I must miss Reden’s birthday,” Ashe said. “That’s why I wanted to ask whether Therem would be going.”

“Right,” I said, trying to gain a foothold of comprehension. “Who is Reden, again? Is he a friend you have in common?”

Ashe laughed, but kindly.

“Not _quite_,” he said.

“Reden is a son we have in common,” said Estraven. “He’s turning ten.”

I had not heard him approach. He stood barefoot in the doorway to the living room, loosely wrapped in a soft, thick, blue-green robe, the sleeves of which were too long for him since it belonged to me. It appeared as though he had put on the first piece of clothing he found so as not to be completely naked in front of a guest. Estraven’s hair was still unbrushed and sleep clung to his eyes. He smiled hazily at me first, then turned to Ashe.

“Hello, Ashe,” he said pleasantly.

“Therem!” Ashe answered. “It’s been some time. It’s good to see you without all those hospital tubes. How have you been keeping?”

He sprang to his feet with his arms open but despite his enthusiasm, he only hugged Estraven very gingerly, out of regard for his ribs.

“Well enough,” Estraven said, giving Ashe’s upper back a polite pat.

Seeing the two of them standing front to front, I was surprised to realize that Ashe was the taller of the two, by at least four inches. I had always thought of Ashe as a small person. His thin frame and his nervous mannerisms of holding his shoulders forward and his arms close to his body made him seem smaller than he really was. Estraven, on the other hand, was broader, rounder, and tended to stand up straight, with a firm stance.

It took Ashe a moment to let go of him. When Ashe did let go, something bittersweet flashed across his face for an instant before he replaced it with the chipperness he had shown me before.

“I was just telling Genry,” he said, “about a foretelling I have a day from now that won’t let me make it to Reden’s birthday. The gathering for him is not an event, really, nothing big. It’s just going to be my older siblings—”

_His _nine_ siblings_, Estraven sent me over mindspeech.

“—and their children.”

_Dozens, at least,_ Estraven supplemented._ I have long since lost count._

“Anyway,” Ashe continued, “I had a gift for Reden.”

Ashe reached into an inner pocket of his light inner coat, which lay beside him on the couch, and pulled out a small parcel wrapped in a mauve paper patterned with white pinecones and skis.

“Tapes,” he explained. “Remember the radio play he was really into a couple years ago? There was a sequel.”

Ashe did not hand the parcel to either of us, but placed it on the armrest beside him. At no point did he request or suggest to Estraven that he deliver it. The implication hung in the air, unspoken. Instead, he said,

“We can say it’s from the both of us, if you like.”

If shifgrethor were a sport, at that point, the crowd and commentators would have gone wild.

“That’s all right,” said Estraven, calm as ever. “I have something for him too.”

“Good!” said Ashe. “Good. I’m sure Ipse and Reden will like to see _ommi_ again.”

This was not a word I recognized.

“And to meet Genry!” he went on. “Ipse is so interested in space, these days, what with the Ekumen news. The other day, on the phone, he kept asking me questions about the moon and solar system. He’s five, so he still thinks I know everything. ‘I only know nothing,’ of course.”

That last part was a quotation from one of the Handdara texts.

“And it’ll lift your spirits too,” Ashe added. “You know my family likes you, Therem,”

“Yes, most of them,” Estraven said casually.

Ashe winced a bit.

“All of them _now_. My parent, rest him, well...you know. But my sibling who’s head of the Foreth hearth _now_ always thought highly of you, as does my _od’hma_, Potha_._”

I did not recognize this word either. My Karhidish was near-fluent; I rarely struggled, but occasionally I found holes in my knowledge shaped like colloquialisms. _Od-_ was a reversive that denoted not quite opposition, but something closer to contrast, like a part and counterpart. The names of the second set of thirteen days of the month, for instance, were the same as the names of the first thirteen days, but with od- tacked on. _Hma_ sounded like it could be a contraction of _amha_, which meant parent, but I was unsure what _un-parent_ was supposed to entail. It didn’t mean child. It didn’t mean parent’s sibling either, because I knew the word for that, and it was _amhēsseyan. _Nor was it grandparent, _hesamha_. A godmother, perhaps? I did not know. I made a note to remember to ask Estraven later.

When I mentally tuned back into the conversation, Ashe was beginning to say his goodbyes and getting ready to go. He buttoned up his light indoor coat over his hieb and slipped a pesthry fur earband over his head. Under the hoods of their outdoor coats, many people in this part of Karhide ended to cover their ears with their hair, but Ashe wore his hair short out of personal preference, and so he had an earband.

“Till we meet again, Genry,” he said.

“You too,” I answered.

I put both my hands out towards him in the gesture of friendship he had used with me before, but he stood on his toes and surprised me, going in for a hug instead.

*

“That was rather affectionate of him,” I said after Ashe was gone. “What do you suppose that was about?”

Estraven lay on the couch, resting the back of his head on my thigh.

“His seal of approval, I think.”

“On us? Have we told him?”

“No, it would have been rude to tell him. But of course Ashe knows,” Estraven said. “I _know_ he knows, and he knows that I know that he knows. He came here today, at this time, because he knew we would be home. It’s the first day after kemmer. My plans for the first day after kemmer tend to be the same.”

“You do usually spend half the day sleeping, yeah. It’s almost like you’re in _thangen_ sleep.”

“It is _not_.”

“It comes pretty close, Therem.”

He grinned, avoiding my gaze.

“Perhaps, but I wouldn’t use _dothe_ during kemmer.”

“That _is_ comforting to know,” I said. “It’s nice that you like me too much to kill me of a heart attack.”

“I do,” he said, yawning and stretching his arms above his head. Then he stepped over to the kitchen, got himself a breadapple, and sat down next to me on the couch.

“It seems my plan for the day must be packing instead of sleeping now,” Estraven confessed.

“Packing?” I asked. “How far is Osborth?”

Estraven gave me a figure in Karhidish miles, which I mentally converted into Terran standard kilometers, then into driving time, then into Gethenian passenger truck driving time.

“So, about six hours?”

“Depending,” answered Estraven.

“Depending on?”

“The unexpected. But generally, yes, six hours. It is not so far. We could be there by nightfall.”

He saw the confusion on my face and added,

“We’ll be expected to stay a few days. And I _do_ want to go. The party’s a day from now, yes, but his actual birthday is tomorrow. Come, let’s pack.”

In the bedroom, he opened his box of clothes at the foot of the bed and kept shifting things to the side, digging around, muttering.

“Do you know, I think—_where is it?_ —I think Ashe is trying to take care of me again. He means well, but—_certain I put it here_—it is not even slightly subtle.”

Ashe’s manner hadn’t struck me as excessively blatant, but to a Karhider, accustomed to real subtlety, it must have been like a huge light-up banner reading, ‘get out of the house and talk to other human beings.’ Coarse-handed but good-hearted, I supposed.

“Ah! Here we are,” he said.

Estraven pulled out a box from inside a sock. The cover was clear plastic, and inside I could see his gift for Reden: a small folding-knife with a pretty handle made either of carved nacre or some iridescent plastic.

“But _you_ don’t carry a knife,” I said.

“That’s different,” he said. “This wouldn’t be for fighting, anyway, since it’s little. It’s only a useful knife. He’s old enough to be sensible with it. And just because I don’t want a knife doesn’t mean he doesn’t want one.”

“Should we wrap it too, like Ashe’s gift?”

Estraven shook his head.

“No need. We have no paper, and the shops wouldn’t be open even if we wanted to get some. We do have nice string, though, from your documents, if you feel we ought to be decorative.”

He meant the notary string from my naturalization papers, which was striped yellow and saffron in the Ehrenrang pattern. The string isn't integral to the document, so it was fine for me to take it off. In fact, Estraven had told me, when we were getting my papers sealed, that notary string was an Orgoreyn-ism and a bureaucratic affectation that would never catch on here, that he had never seen any office in any city or town outside Ehrenrang use string, that he strongly suspected that the clerk that day was putting on a show for me, the Alien, and that the real use, if not the purpose, of the balls of string was to give the clerks something to amuse themselves with on dull days. Like cats, I’d said, laughing, and then got into a long conversation with Estraven about Terran pet-keeping conventions.

I fetched Estraven the string, then had an idea, and opened my tin of pictures and fished out about ten pictures from Terra showing plants, places, and animals.

If I was going to be a stepfather of sorts, whatever that entailed here, I wanted to make a good first impression.

“Therem?”

“Yes?”

“Do you think Reden would like these?” I asked, holding up the pictures.

Estraven looked up at me.

“Are you going to give them to him as a gift? You don’t have to, you know.”

“But would he like them?”

“I think so,” he said, “yes.”

“By the way, before I forget,” I asked, “what did Ashe mean by _ommi?_”

“_Good_ question,” Estraven said, neatly folding a pair of socks and placing it at the bottom of a backpack. “It’s a bit infantilizing, isn’t it? They are children, not _babies_. They’re not going to be saying ommi anymore. Od’hma,_ maybe_, if anything.”

“That’s short for _odamha_, right?” I asked, hoping I’d inferred correctly.

“Yes.”

“And what does _that_ mean?”

“Ah,” said Estraven. “I see. Hmm. Well, it’s not a word anyone would have recognized thirteen or so years ago. You still don’t often see it in writing. ‘Parent’s kemmering,’ is what you’d have said. Or you’d call him your getter if you absolutely needed to be more specific. Most of the time, you would use the person’s name if you knew him.”

“So _you’re_ ommi.”

Estraven shot me a dark look.

“That’s not a word adults use,” he said, “but I am the person Ashe was referring to, yes. That is my relationship to his children.”

“So odamha is _‘father_,’” I said, using the word from my native tongue.

“It probably comes close enough,” Estraven said, noncommittal.

I began to pack my own bag, and to think.

*

Estraven, like me, spoke multiple languages, and had so casually brought up the problem with which every translator is intimate: words only ever come close enough. Even two words in the same language, even two words with the same referent, are often riddled with connotations that drag them to such different areas within the net of meaning. _Odamha_ was _father_, and it wasn’t. _Odamha_ was a neologism where _father_ was old as bones. _Father_ was single-gendered where _odamha_ was unmarked. _Father_ could lend itself to metaphor, as in “father of temporalist physics,” whereas I had no idea how _odamha_ could operate. I even had no idea what the role was like, socially.

What was fatherhood on a world where parenthood meant motherhood?

But those were my clumsy West-Eng. Terran terms, and they did not come close enough on a world of ambigendered fathers and ambigendered mothers. What was the “other parent” on a planet where the word _parent_ only ever meant the single person who gave birth, except in cases of adoption?

I hadn’t thought much of Estraven as a parent in the Terran sense. I _had_ thought of him as a parent in the Gethenian sense; he spoke far more about his young adult child Sorve than he did about either of his children with Ashe, which is to say, not very much. The topic of Sorve was painful for him, and understandably so. I was never the one to bring it up. The person I loved could not return to Estre, the land of his birth, and had not seen his eldest child since that child was a baby in his arms. Of course I wouldn’t bring it up. I had no right to prod at the wound. No one did. They wrote to each other, but only from time to time. Twice, Estraven had confided in me, forlornly, “I wish Sorve would travel.”

Of his other children, I had only learned the names today. And them, he had been around to raise. It was something of a paradox.

*

We were packed and leaving the apartment now, not exactly in a hurry, but determined to get to the passenger truck depot on time. The passenger trucks were sort of like old Terran travel busses, but with treads instead of wheels, and serviced routes between the capital and its circle of closest towns and villages. Osborth was close enough to be counted among the environs of Ehrenrang but was second to last on the line that passed through it. Estraven had called ahead about the schedule, and since there was limited service due to the holiday, we had to walk fast to catch the last truck to Osborth.

My thoughts were still meandering.

“I hadn’t thought much about you having children,” I mused aloud.

Estraven stopped in the middle of the doorway.

“And you are thinking about it now?” he asked.

“Yes.”

“It’s not something we have discussed,” he said.

“Right,” I agreed. “I suppose it hasn’t come up.”

“Perhaps we ought to discuss it,” Estraven said.

He paused, pensive, still only half out the door. When he spoke, his words were cautious and gentle.

“I’m sorry. This is all sudden and I haven’t had time to give it enough thought. I only hope for your sake, Genly, that you don’t have your heart too firmly set on it.”

“What?”

“What I mean is that I am over forty. It’s less likely to happen, even if we try. And then there’s my landname, which I cannot pass on. Would not Harth rem ir Nowhere be a difficult name for a child to bear? Not an impossible one, mind, but it’s a heavy question.”

“Oh,” I said, “my god, that’s not what I meant at all. I’m sorry Therem, I misspoke. Wow, that’s...that’s a completely different conversation. I meant kemmering-children, not _children_-children. As in the children that you already have. Or got? Sorry! I’ve heard people say got. Is it ‘got’ instead of ‘have’ if you didn’t personally bear—”

He put a hand up.

“Genly, dear, _nusuth_. You didn’t make any mistakes. It’s only that, colloquially, if you say—”

“Colloquially, right. If I say it like that, people would think—”

“They’ll think you mean—”

“Right. What you thought I meant.”

“Exactly,” he said.

A bit embarrassed, I trudged on and we left the building. After a few minutes of walking, Estraven’s pace started to slacken, and he handed his pack to me, wordlessly. The gun injury had made a couple things difficult for him, and I think it affected his pride as well. Not in the masculine strength-pride sense, since he was not a single-gendered person like me, but in the normal sense, as a reaction to losing an ability. He had skills in physical endurance that he had trained up and developed himself, and to lose some of them was hard. He didn’t like to be huffing at a brisk walk, so I tried not to draw attention to it, but slowed my pace down to match his.

“None of that,” Estraven said, when he noticed. It was direct, but not harsh or offended, and I appreciated his directness.

“We’ll be late,” he said, “I’d rather not miss the passenger truck.”

I picked up my pace again, but only very slightly. We still made it to the depot with time enough to get tickets.

When we mounted the passenger truck, I noticed that it was relatively empty. It could have sat about sixty people. Besides Estraven, myself, and the driver, there were only about thirteen people on board. Today did not seem to be a popular day for travel.

Estraven settled down at the back of the passenger truck and caught his breath. The driver waited for a few minutes, perhaps to see whether there would be any more passengers. When none came, the vehicle rumbled into motion, strong, steady, and slow, like some great ruminant beast. It was a soothing motion, nothing like some cars I had known lifetimes ago on Terra. On a particularly tight turn in the road, but not a fast one, Estraven’s body sloped towards mine and stayed there. He was resting, but not so deeply as not to notice things, and he adjusted his position to lay his head more comfortably on my shoulder. Every couple minutes, he would shift a bit, and try to get into a more agreeable position. He was sleepy, but not sleeping.

I decided to make conversation.

“What are odamhas like?”

Estraven yawned.

“What does an odamha do?” I asked.

“I’m sure you know where children come from,” he answered churlishly. “Your earth is not so unlike mine.”

“I’m asking about social roles,” I said.

“I know,” said Estraven, “I know. It’s bad luck that you catch me in a drowsy mood when I catch you in an anthropological one, though I don’t know whose bad luck it turns out to be. Mine, I suppose.”

He sat up and turned to face me before continuing,

“I think you could compare the role, in one respect, to that Terran convention you were telling me about a while ago. I forget what it was called. You know, when some families have an animal that lives in their house and are friends with it, and it’s perfectly normal but no one thinks you need to have an animal in your house to have a family. Like that, except with a human being.”

I tried not to stare.

“Like a cat? Therem, a person’s not like a cat!”

“I know. What I’m saying is that the institution of keeping a cat—what was it called?”

“Having _pets?”_

“Having pets is entirely optional. Knowing one’s getter is entirely optional. Think of hearth-holds. It does not matter whether someone is conceived in a kemmerhouse or by a vowed couple. He is raised by the parent and the rest of the parent’s hearth, not by the getter’s, though the getter could join the parent’s hearth if he chose, and if the hearth is able support him too.”

Having said this, Estraven then relaxed into a more comfortable position in his seat with his eyes closed.

“So, it’s fair to say that a getter is not the same thing as an odamha, yes?” I asked.

“It is fair to say that.”

“Then I repeat my question. What does an odamha _do?_ Are odamhas unique to hearth-holds or could they also be found in cities, in small families started by couples or groups? What is an odamha like? Or someone who keeps kemmer with another person and gets children with them and lives with the family, if you don’t like the word.”

Estraven sighed.

“I don’t dislike the word, Genly.”

“Sorry.”

“I do think it’s a good word to have,” Estraven said. “I can admit the concept is important.”

“Is it important to you?” I asked, and immediately regretted it.

Estraven was looking at me with an aggressive neutrality of expression. There was nothing in his eyes to show anger, but his jaw was clenched. I shrank back.

“I didn’t mean it like that, Therem. I am sorry.”

“And I am _tired_ today,” he said. “Do not mistake my reticence for apathy. I am not apathetic. Do you remember where this truck is going? Do not think you have asked me a simple question. There are many nations on this planet, many kinds of family structure, yes, and many kinds of people. If I cannot provide a textbook answer for you on the spot, it is not because I have not given the subject any thought, but because, at the moment, I would like to be resting.”

Estraven paused, and his shoulders sagged. He covered his face with one hand.

“Forgive me,” he said. “There was no need to be so short with you.”

_“Nusuth,” _I said. “Forgive me too.”

“Yes,” he said.

I let him return to his fitful nap and looked out the window as the landscape of thole trees and hemmens passed us slowly by. The truck stopped by a few towns and villages. Some passengers got off. Fewer got on. I was not particularly paying attention.

*

I dozed for a while too, and when I woke, I thought Estraven was still sleeping. He wasn’t. He was awake and sat perfectly still, looking out the window. I think he caught me looking at him out of the corner of his eye. He didn’t turn to speak to me but kept looking out the window.

“Will you tell me about Terra, then? About fathers?” he said, using the word from my language.

“I can see your point now,” I said.

“My point?”

“That it’s a difficult question. Not one for me to spring on a person who’s trying to sleep.”

He smiled apologetically.

“I wasn’t trying to make a point, Genly.”

“But it is a broad question,” I said.

“Yes. I’m aware it probably _also_ varies from culture to culture, and within a culture.”

“Enough to fill books.”

“You could tell me about yours,” Estraven said quietly, “if you’d like.”

I must have taken a while to answer, because he added,

“You don’t have to,” as I began to speak.

But I did tell him. I started trying to explain gender roles and parenting in Borland, but that got me nowhere. It was all so vague as to sound silly, and I kept having to stop to add that a particular rule, notion, or expectation didn’t apply half the time, or no longer existed but as a memory of a time when it did, or was generally unconscious rather than intentional, or could be subverted.

I began talking about my own father instead, partly by accident. I think the subject of division of labor within the home had come up. My mother had read once that women tended to wind up doing more chores and had made sure that wouldn’t be the case in her home. She and my father kept a fair rota of chores on the refrigerator, like roommates often did. Except, since I’d grown up seeing this at home, it struck me as a familial thing to do when I first saw roommates using rotas.

The three of us lived in Borland, in an apartment. I was an only child and my father had been one too. My mother’s family was bigger, and though my mother respected my occasional need for quiet and time alone, my father truly understood it. With him, I could spend hours alone together. He worked as a journalist, and when he had enough free time at home, he drew and painted. I liked to watch. His name was Ai Wade.

“His name was Ai?” Estraven asked.

“Some places on Terra style family name first.”

“I understand that,” Estraven said. “On Gethen too, in the archipelago. But you have the same name. Did he take your mother’s family name when they—forgive me if I get this wrong—vowed marrying? Marriage?”

“Well, they weren’t married. They just decided to be together, like us. But no. My mother’s family name was Coleman. He,” I said, referring to my mother, for we were still speaking Karhidish, “was Mona Coleman. Short for Ramona.”

“And you have your father’s name.”

“Yes.”

He nodded, listening and learning.

“She wasn’t my mother by birth, but she was my mother. My parents got together when I was two. I can’t remember a time without her, and I’m not sure I’d want to.

“They met while working in reclamation. Everyone works in reclamation for a while. It’s not a rule, but people are more likely to sign up than not. Communities are much larger than they were right after the Age of the Enemy, but still not as large as they were in the old days, so signing up for reclamation is a way of seeing the world as much as it is a way of repairing the earth. Neither of my parents were from the area where they’d gotten assigned, but they decided to stay there, because they liked it, and they liked the hills.

“Even though I wound up studying history, there was a time in my teens when I talked about nothing but physics. My mother was an engineer and we could talk for hours, but my dad couldn’t follow. He tried, but there were conversations I’d have with him where midway, he would stop and grin and say, ‘I have no idea what we’ve been on about. I lost you five minutes ago.’ But he encouraged me. He encouraged my interests and my studies, you know. He didn’t have to understand to be proud.

“He did understand time dilation, though. He’d suspected for a while that I’d wind up off-planet and had made peace with the idea long before I’d even made the decision. My dad was in his late fifties when I left for Hain, and just short of eighty when I arrived there, while I hadn’t aged. My mother had passed in the interim, so it was just him and me left. We stayed in touch via ansible until—we stayed in touch for as long as he lived, which was almost another two years. I had a letter from my dad that he slipped in my suitcase just before I left. It was meant to be his last letter, but I opened it while he was still alive, which I think was the right choice. It gave us much to talk about. There was a lot we hadn’t known about each other, and there was a lot that had happened in the twenty years that he had lived while I was in transit. My dad had changed in some ways and it felt strange for me. Not because I didn’t recognize him. Of course I recognized him. He was still the person I knew and loved, and he’d grown in positive ways. It was strange not having been able to watch it happen, I suppose.”

I felt Estraven’s hand on mine at this point. He said nothing, but touched my hand slowly and lightly, like a touch meant to soothe. I hadn’t realized what my voice sounded like.

“There was a picture in that letter,” I continued, “one of his drawings, a tiny watercolor of a spaceship, but not of what a spaceship actually looks like. It was what people centuries and centuries ago thought they’d look like. I got it as a tattoo the year after my dad died, fifty years later in Earth time, when I was training on Ollul. I had to get rid of it before I came here.”

“I’m sorry,” Estraven said.

I knew he meant about my father, but I could only bring myself to talk about the tattoo, god knows why.

“There was a legitimate reason for getting rid of it,” I said lamely. “I can’t remember what.”

“Would you ever have it re-inked?”

Gethen had tattooing too. Estraven in particular had some rather striking ones I had seen around his thighs in thin, dotted, crisscrossing bands. It was a Kerm land tradition, he’d said. Preparation for Sorve’s birth.

“I’ve thought about it,” I said. “I don’t know.”

Estraven nodded, and I finally took his hand in mine. We sat quietly for most of the rest of the ride. Not silently. We did talk, but not about anything specific.

*

It was still light out when we arrived at Osborth. I had only partly gotten used to the fact days on Gethen were the same length every season. Here we were nearing the end of autumn, nearing the end of the day, and the sun was only just beginning to set.

The terrain was merciful here. No winding, hilly paths for Osborth. The town sat on a plain, and the path down from the truck road only sloped very slightly downwards. From where we stood, I could understand the layout of the town. It was too big to be called a village, but only barely, and the buildings concentrated in the middle, roads gradually spreading out like a spiderweb, wrapping partly around a half-frozen lake, and finally tapering off into smaller dwellings and farmland. The truck road we had come on cut through some of the less dense area, so that when we walked towards the town proper, there was still Osborth ahead of us and Osborth behind us.

Estraven knew the way and pointed out the Foreth hearth to me. It had five solid, low buildings that met in a courtyard, and lay closer to the town proper, but not quite within it. The walk there wouldn’t take us more than thirty minutes, and there weren’t many people out on the roads. We were alone.

“I think I’ll tell you about Beor,” Estraven said softly, out of nowhere, “now that I’ve been thinking about him. Shall I?”

“Of course.”

“He was from Ebos. Beor Herren em Ebos, but he lived with us Harths in Estre. We called him his first name, because that was the done thing at the time when my generation was young. He would have made a good parent—mother, you’d say—but it never chanced that way. He was thoughtful and gentle with us, his kemmering-children. I turned out to look a lot like him. Round, though not quite as round as him, but more like him in face than like my parent. In temperament, we turned out alike too, like deep still waters, not easy to disturb. Still, he was far less angry than I can be sometimes. We were all Handdara, but I only ever spent two years at the Rotherer fastness; he had practically grown up in it.

“Rotherer was where he met my parent, and that was a whole story. Whenever Beor told it, he would try to make it more entertaining. Not invent anything, no. He was very honest, always, but there were ways he said things. Like when he said that he’d been in the Foretellers’ circle, he’d say he had to leave because he wasn’t very good at his role.”

“He wasn’t a very good weaver?”

“Celibate, Genly. Beor was one of the Celibates before he met my parent. That’s the joke. Not untrue, but it sounds more scandalous phrased that way, which amused him. My parent—Esvans is his name, he is still alive—had come to the fastness to accompany a friend who was to become an indweller there. This friend had no siblings, and neither did Esvans, since there’d been an illness around some ten years back, so Esvans was the one accompanying him. Beor had been the one to receive them both into the fastness and guide them around. That was how they met. He was a Celibate, and then he met my parent. Not untrue. They were both somer at the time, but do you know how it is on those rare occasions when you meet someone and you know that you must be friends with that person, that you need to be, no matter what? It was that. They both felt that way.”

It was certainly not how Estraven and I had felt about each other when we first met, I realized with a pang of regret, but it was a feeling I knew, so I nodded and Estraven went on.

“So Beor knew he was going to be in love with him. He knew it from the moment he heard that it was my parent’s friend, and not my parent who was the one who would stay at the fastness. Beor always said that his heart plummeted the moment he heard this, and that the moment afterwards he was already planning to run away with him.”

Estraven smiled very slightly, despite himself, and said,

“That’s how he told it. He liked the sound of running away. It made him sound more mischievous. What he was actually planning was a long, measured, thoughtful letter. So, he composed his declaration of resignation, and read it out to the rest of the Foretellers, who accepted it without any trouble. That was how my parent came back to Estre with Beor. My parent wasn’t Lord of Estre yet, so he’d had to ask his parent if Beor could join the hearth. He said yes, but it must have been a strange exchange. Imagine: ‘May my soon-to-be-kemmering come live with us?’ ‘Yes. _Who? _Since _when?_’ But it worked out perfectly. My grandparent liked Beor immensely.”

Estraven grew silent again, awash in memory, and I looked at the landscape. To our left, over the lake ahead of us, the sun was low now, glinting off its half-frozen surface. Behind us, the sky was beginning to take on a dim, purplish quality. I was so caught up in admiring the fading light, that I scarcely noticed when Estraven began speaking again. He was focused and quiet, and the wind was picking up now, fading away some of his words. I didn’t dare ask him to speak louder. To interrupt would have been to break the spell, to ruin the presence.

“...but Beor never shouted. One time, Arek and I got onto the roof of the hearth. We were very small, at this point. It feels like it was in another life. He had to help me up. It was my idea, I remember, but we weren’t up there to play or do any stunts or dangerous things, just to look out at the valley before everyone else woke up. I was an absurdly serious child. But I suppose the roof was icy, so it was unsafe. It was dawn. Beor was out, cutting wood, and when he saw us, all he did was look at us. Now, my parent would have yelled. My parent’s temper thankfully mellowed out as he aged, but at this point, he would have been furious. Not Beor, though. Beor only said that he wanted to tell us something, but that we should come down from the roof to hear it, because he didn’t want to be loud and wake the whole hearth up. He helped us down and then told us that we had to be cautious with our lives, and with each other’s lives. He told Arek he had to protect me, and I remember I thought he was saying it because Arek was older, though he was only a year older. But then he also told me I had to protect Arek too. Because if we did, then someday, when Arek and I outlived him and our parent, we would still have each other. Arek started bawling at this, at the idea of any of us aging or dying. He was always more emotional than me. But Beor picked him up and comforted him and assured him no harm had been done.

“In my whole life, I only saw Beor angry once. And he wasn’t angry at me, or at Arek. It was at the calendar, and the ancient laws.

“What you have to understand is that Arek and I—”

Here, Estraven sighed a long and pained sigh, and fell quiet again. I didn’t think he’d keep telling the story, and I didn’t want him to, not if it hurt. I had never asked Estraven to tell it, because I knew it hurt to tell. It was like this too when we first practiced mindspeech on the ice. Whenever I bespoke him then, something in him winced away as if I touched a wound. I did not want to hurt Estraven. Even now, when we used mindspeech, he only ever used it to speak to me, and I would only listen. I would not answer in words, only images and feelings, for my voice in his head was the voice of a ghost. I had long ago decided that when he wanted to be candid, I would listen attentively, and when he wanted to be reserved, I would not press. One may keep a few things between oneself and one’s heart, and still be loved, trusted, and understood. My love for him did not ask him to prise out the fragile secrets of his heart and expose them to the brutal light.

“It’s all right if you don’t—” I began.

“Arek and I,” he continued, as if I hadn’t spoken, “never swore a vow as lovers. We never could have What we promised each other was not to be parted. We loved each other dearly, closely, deeply, more than anyone else we knew. We were careful not to lose what we already had. More than careful, we were lucky. If we met in the kemmerhouse, we pretended it was by chance. We only met in the same shape. Nobody begrudges you a chance meeting in a small town. But I hated being with anyone else. It felt false, as if it were wronger. What happened was bound to happen sooner or later. We never meant—what happened was—it was on the way to Mount Teremander. It was when we went on a trip with four of our friends from Stok, a couple hundred miles out on the Kerm Ice, to see Mount Teremander. It was an adventure, and then it was a tragedy, and then we got to see our mountain. It’s a beautiful mountain. It’s sublime. I do not want to see it ever again. I used to cover it on maps, afterwards. I probably still would, even now. Isn’t that absurd? It has been so many years. What happened was—the timing, the cycles, the calendar, god’s cruel joke—it wouldn’t have been a problem on its own. These things happen to people without making problems. But I got pregnant. This also happens to people, but in our case, it meant one of us would have to leave home and hearth. ‘Lest the ground be defiled,’ the law said. It doesn’t have to make sense. It doesn’t have to be fair.

“Of course, neither of us wanted to lose Estre, or the other. He was in absolute panic, the kind that barely lets you think or breathe. But I’m painting him all wrong to you. I’m telling you about what he was like at his most wounded moments. I’m not telling you about his ferventness, his sincerity, his quick wit, his wisdom. Neither of us were wise in this crisis, of course, and it wouldn’t have helped if we had been. Our luck had turned against us so completely.

“And yet we still thought there could be some loophole in the law. In an _ancient_ law, one of the oldest known. Perhaps we could somehow sidestep bringing ritual pollution to the hearth. How optimistic! We were just over twenty, optimistic, terrified, and in a crisis.

“I hadn’t studied with the Handdara yet. I didn’t know how to sublimate kemmer into the untrance. That was why I wanted to join the Handdara, or at least it was at first. That was the plan I concocted to calm him. It was only a false hope. I get foolish in a crisis. I thought at the time that if we could prove that at least one of us knew how to abstain, that if Arek and I could guarantee it wouldn’t happen again, then no one would make us be parted or leave Estre. That was what we promised each other. Not to be parted from Estre or each other.

“There was no loophole, no. The law was too old and simple for a loophole. I was pregnant, and that was that. Ritual exile is ritual exile. One of us had to leave.

“I was the one to leave, for his sake. We decided together. I was the one to leave, so that I could stay a little while longer, until my Sorve was born and weaned. I believed that if Arek had been forced to leave Estre, it would have killed him. I never accounted for the guilt that might kill him if he stayed. It wasn’t...good for Arek’s mind to drag out the separation. It can’t be healthy for anyone, but especially not for him, to hear someone one loves and respects struggling in labor in a room one is barred from entering and to know that one is somehow complicit in the pain and the exertion and the mess and to know that it’s not a burden one can shoulder with them. It was all scarring for Arek. I wonder what would have happened if we had decided the other way around, if he had left instead. The same, probably. In another life I’d be asking myself the same question. It is not answerable. I ought not ask.

“Beor never blamed either of us. Beor never blamed Arek for his suicide either. Poor Beor. He was the one to find him. I think he truly believed to the end that Arek’s death was an accident. I don’t think he was trying to cover Arek’s honor. Beor didn’t lie. Like I said, he never lied.

“Beor also took it hard when I left. And he took it hard when Arek died. He grew depressed, and—his heart, it—he wasn’t all that young, and—”

Estraven’s face was wet, and his breaths were shuddering. I stopped him walking and held him. He buried his face in my chest.

“I’m sorry,” I said.

He said something in response, but it was muffled. Then he sent me flashes of memories over a mental link. Some things can’t be said.

_—thirteen years ago: opening a letter and seeing the name Beor Herren em Ebos and seeing the past tense and suddenly knowing, before reading it, what it is about—_

A warm memory next, but tinged with a vast, gaping chasm of loss,

_—thirty-five years ago, maybe more: a person sitting by a fire, quietly stoking it. He looks like an older, plumper Estraven, and on second glance his face is not quite the same. Beor catches the viewer’s eye and his face changes from pensive to amused. He starts making shapes with his hands to cast the shadows at a nearby wall. The viewer does not look at the shadows. The viewer looks at his face—_

_—nine years ago: Ashe, but younger, face unlined, longer hair tucked up in a braid, laughing, looking down at the back of his hieb where a child, Reden, clings on to it, very young, also laughing, walking on wobbly legs. A sense of happiness. Within the memory, a thought, an imagining: a different child, Sorve, vague and unknown in face and shape, also walking. A sight deprived of, impossible to witness. The sense of happiness from before curdling, a feeling that it has not been earned—_

_—twenty, thirty, forty years ago: Estre, Estre, Estre. Estre in summer, the gray-needled, knurled, scrubby little thore trees, taller hemmens with their pale rosy boughs, the occasional black vate, the crunch of needles underfoot, the smell of sap. Estre in spring, a certain creek unfreezing, the sound of ice cracking, bubbles giving way. Estre in autumn, indoors, a great kitchen steaming and sizzling, savory smells, mouthwatering spices. Estre in winter, at dawn, a view from a high point of the valley below. Estre, all of beautiful Estre, all suffused with a profound melancholy—_

I sent back,

—_Borland, on Earth, over one hundred years ago, Earth time, but the memory is only twenty-six years old. Summer, warm June. Green hills, fruit trees, an orchard, one of those orchards open to the public to fill their own baskets for a fee. A woman with dark skin, tall, though perhaps only taller than the viewer. She offers a fistful of cherries to a shorter man, who doesn’t eat them but puts them in a plastic bucket the viewer is holding. The woman laughs, the man picks a blossom from a tree and gives it to her. She takes it and puts it behind the arm of his eyeglasses, in his short, black hair. It falls and wafts down to the ground—_

_—Indoors, an apartment, fifteen years ago, a man sitting at a desk with a pencil, quiet, focused. Now and then, he erases, and blows away the residue. A furry animal, brown with darker stripes, lies on the desk, curled up. Lazy, but awake. The man speaks to it, shows it the picture. “It doesn’t look very much like you, Christine,” he says, matter-of-factly, like one speaking to a person. A pleasant laugh, coming from the viewer. Slightly startled and sheepish, the man looks up and says, “Genly, I didn’t see you arrive!”—_

_—seven years ago, on Hain, the ansible room. The text on the screen spelled, not like an unfamiliarity with the spelling of the words, but like typing mistakes. An imagining, unbidden, of bony hands, papered over in dry skin, shaking. The imagining suppressed; a response typed out—_

_—six years ago, on Hain, the ansible room. Nothing. No one at the keyboard, the lights off, dark. A private place, well-suited for a quick cry—_

Spilling over the mental link from Estraven’s side,

—_grief, presence_—

Spilling over the mental link from my side,

—_grief, presence_—

In that moment, we share, we understand, we are understood, we are not alone, we are together, we are comforted.

It was an intense feeling. I felt unsteady on my feet and sat down. Estraven also sat down beside me, on the hard, frosted-over ground. We were both breathing deeply, calmly. I felt him reach into my coat pocket and pull out a pair of clean handkerchiefs. He used them to wipe his face and mine.

“Thank you,” someone said, but I wasn’t sure which of us.

We got up and kept walking.

It had gotten dark now, but not so dark as to leave us stumbling down the path. We could see the lights of the Foreth hearth some four hundred meters away. There was an archway at the end of the path that led towards the buildings’ shared courtyard, like the idea of a gate but without actual doors. As we drew nearer, I saw two figures in a window of the house closest to the archway, lit from behind by the glow of the room. I saw them only briefly, and then they were gone.

As we drew closer down the path to the hearth, there were lamps by our sides, lining the path, making us visible to the hearth-dwellers. We had passed the third of these lamps when we caught sight of someone in the archway. He was a small person, and he stood watching us patiently.

Estraven waved, and out from behind this person came an even smaller person, about three and a half feet tall, barreling towards us at top speed. Estraven put down his pack and crouched, holding out his good arm. I thought the child would knock him over, but Estraven caught him perfectly, picked him up, and spun him around.

“Shoulders, please! Up! Hup!” the younger son-daughter said.

“Ohhh, you’re getting far too big for shoulders, Ipse!” Estraven said. “Unless…”

He handed Ipse carefully to me, and the child shrieked delightedly.

“This is my friend and partner, Genly,” Estraven said, looking up at the child whose chin was perched atop my head.

“Hello, Genry!” Ipse said to my scalp. “You’re very, very tall. Are you the spacefarer?”

“I was,” I answered, “but now I live on this planet.”

“Hmm,” Ipse said in his pipe-like voice. “Well, hmm. And have you seen all the planets?”

“Only four.”

“Hmm!” he said. “But there’s more than four. There’s got to be at least a hundred planets.”

“There’s trillions.”

“Trillions?! Hmm. But not all with people on them, right? Some of them’s just rocks and clouds.”

“That’s right.”

“So how many inhibit—whoops—in_habit_ed?”

“Probably up to a hundred,” I answered honestly.

“Well, there you go!” he said triumphantly. “I did say one hundred, didn’t I? Reden! Reden, come faster! _Maba**[1]**_ was right! He’s here! He’s here and he brought the spacefarer! I knew it!”

The older sibling, Reden, was walking towards us at a more controlled and dignified pace, but he picked up the length of his strides to meet us. Reden was slight of frame like Ashe, but not yet as tall as Estraven, and had the same dark, heavy brows and lashes as his sire. He greeted me so formally, I half-expected him to use a handshake, single-handed, Terran-style. He didn’t, of course.

Turning to Estraven, Reden asked, quite politely, about how the trip here from Ehrenrang had been. It struck me as cold, but Estraven didn’t seem to react as if rejected. He looked warmly on the young person’s stern expression.

“The road conditions were good,” Estraven replied.

“That’s good,” Reden said. “And your health?”

“Improving.”

“Good,” Reden said. “I’m—”

He put his arms around Estraven and held him tight for several seconds. Estraven held him tight too.

“I’m glad you came to see us,” Reden said, simply.

“As am I,” Estraven answered.

Then, after a pause, somewhat puzzled,

“You have bits of paper in your hair, Reden.”

He did. His hair was loose, slightly waved as if taken out of braids, and strewn through with liny shreds of pink, white, and orange. I had not realized it was not just decoration.

“It was Medran,” Ipse informed me.

“Medran?” I asked.

“A cousin,” Estraven said.

Reden looked up at Ipse on my shoulders, his gaze pointed though not harsh.

“And _who_ helped Medran rip up the paper?” he demanded.

“Hmm!” said Ipse vaguely. “People, I suppose.”

Estraven laughed and shook his head.

“They made confetti because they wanted to surprise me tomorrow,” Reden explained, “but couldn’t wait till then, could they?”

The older child shrugged at me as if to say, _children, you know?_ It suddenly struck me that I recognized the seriousness of his face from somewhere. Estraven was beaming at him.

“Confetti?” Estraven asked. “What ever happened to eggs? Don’t people crack eggs anymore?”

A grin broke out across Reden’s face, mischievous, more like a child now.

“Oh, they do, they do!” he said. “_Amsyan**[2]**_ Kitse says a birthday doesn’t count unless someone cracks an egg on my head, but I know he’s trying to be silly. Old Potha and I hid all the eggs, though, so no one’s _ever_ going to find them.”

“Please excuse us for a moment,” he said to me, bouncing on his heels, formal, but not cold. “I must speak to Therem.”

Reden stood on his toes to reach Estraven’s ear.

“I’ve got to show you where we hid the eggs, od’hma.” he whispered to Estraven, conspiratorial. “Come in! Come in and I’ll show you where!”

Then father and son were off hand in hand towards the hearth, turned into silhouettes by the lamplight of the courtyard, Estraven taking long strides and Reden going not quite at a run, but at an upbeat, springing walk. With Ipse secure on my shoulders both our packs in my hands, I followed in their wake, into the Foreth hearth.

[1] Karh. diminutive/affectionate form of _amha,_ mother-parent. Equivalent to West-Eng. _mama, mom_.

[2] Karh. an informal contraction of _amhēs-seyan_, from _amha_, mother-parent, and _seyan_, sibling. Equivalent to West-Eng._ aunt, uncle, mothersib_.


	2. notes on this fic

‘Maba,’ the Gethenian version of ‘mama,’ is attested in “Coming of Age in Karhide” and in “The Shobies’ Story.”

‘Amha,’ ‘mother/parent-in-the-flesh,’ is attested in chapter seven of TLHoD.

‘Seyan’, ‘sibling,’ is attested in the BBC radio play of _The Left Hand of Darkness_, when Estraven tells Genly the hearth tale of the place inside the blizzard.

‘Mothersib,’ ‘aunt/uncle’ is attested in “Coming of Age in Karhide,” but it’s a story that uses the premise that the narrator, Sov, is not writing in Karhidish. So, I made up a Karhidish word, for the fun of it. I’ve decided ‘amha’ becomes ‘amhēs’ in the genitive case to form ‘amhēsseyan,’ because otherwise I looked at all that Greek in undergrad for nothing. Short alpha declension fans make some noise!

‘Odamha,’ something almost, but not quite, entirely unlike ‘father,’ is not attested in any of Le Guin’s stories. That’s my coining based on the calendar and clock chapter of TLHoD. ‘Odamha’ turns into ‘od’hma,’ the equivalent of ‘dad,’ because a bunch of my friends are linguists and their pernicious influence has made me think that consonant clusters and metathesis are cool. I have simple tastes! I love a good H sound! Languages are so fun, guys. I nearly wrote a bit in the conversation where Estraven’s like, “children, Genly? At my age?” where the misunderstanding came from Genly conjugating a verb wrong by leaving out a perfective-aspect infix. But then I was like, you know what? That’s a little too self-indulgent and tangential!

‘Ommi’ comes from *od+maba (ommaba). I think they’re close to ‘daddy’ and ‘dada.’ Which is why it’s weird for Estraven when Genly essentially asks him if he’s daddy.

‘Hesamha,’ ‘grandparent-in-the-flesh,’ is another thing I cobbled together by stealing the ‘hes' of ‘hes-kyorremy’ (higher council/parliament) and tacking it on to ‘amha.’

A sitto phone is just me taking citófono, the (cooler-sounding!) word for entry-buzzer/intercom from my native language and putting a little Karhidish spin on it. (Soft C is not attested in Karhidish.)

“Reading Coming of Age in Karhide” and “The Shobies’ Story,” and to a lesser extent, “Winter’s King” helped supplement _The Left Hand of Darkness_ in forming a picture of Karhidish family structures and the role of the not-mother parent.

“Winter’s King” describes Argaven the 17th’s (she/her) parent in the flesh as an ogre, someone whom she felt safest away from when she was a child. There was an adult called Borhub with whom the young Argaven felt safer, but there’s no indication of who Borhub is, or what her relation to young Argaven is. Whatever the relationship is, it is clearly not as important as the person’s name.

TLHoD primarily gives an outsider’s perspective on hearths, kemmer, and relationship structures on Gethen. Still, I find the fact that King Argaven the 15th (he/him) is trying for an heir of the flesh because kemmering-children only sort-of “count” incredibly telling. It’s such a small detail and it manages to imply so much about fatherhood on Gethen.

Sov’s (no pronouns, temporary she/her during kemmer) ancestral hearth in “Coming of Age” sheds light on how class intersects with family structure. Sov's hearth, Ereb Tage in Rer, discourages vowing kemmer because they’re not posh. Someone or another’s mother is quoted as saying, "Vowing kemmer, what do you think you are, some kind of noble? some kind of fancy person?” Sov has plenty of family: mother and grandmother and cousins and siblings and cousins’ parents and siblings’ children, but this is not a hearth where people have fathers. It’s not till Sov's mid-teens that Sov learns who their getter is. Nevertheless, Kharrid is still around the hearth, working as a cook. If you read this story, I should warn you that there’s a moment where Sov and Kharrid have what can only be called Weird Vibes—but without crossing into incest.

In “The Shobies’,” on the other hand, the family structure is different. The Gethenians on the ship (no pronouns at all) are a Karhidish family of four: one couple with a six-year-old and a four-year-old. (Incidentally, those are the ages assigned to Ashe’s two children by Estraven in the radio play. I chose to make them ten and five instead. Estraven swearing oath to Ashe specifically because there was a child on the way makes better sense to me.) In “The Shobies’,” Oreth is Asten’s mother and Rig’s father, and Karth is Rig’s mother and Asten’s father. They are both very loving to both their children, but the young children only ever address their respective birthparent as maba, and there is a faint, faint sense in the family’s interactions that the parent who bore the child has more of a responsibility for that child than the other. In one scene, around a fire, each child lies on their mother’s lap. At another point in the story when Asten and Rig are both distressed, Oreth picks up Asten and Karth picks up Rig.

Lastly, here are some things from the fic that I stole from Real Life:

Notary string: they have that in Germany, but also, for some reason, in a stationery shop in a Canadian city where I lived for a bit.

Getting an egg cracked on your head on your birthday: I’m from South America! I have personally seen this happen to people when I was in elementary school. It’s very gooey! They do this in other places too, but not where I currently live, so I have dodged my designated egg this year. I’m now 23 and no eggs were harmed in the making of this.


End file.
